Just when you had us on our feet cheering your foreign policy courage in meeting with Kim Jong-Un and Vladimir Putin, with all of the Swamp against you, you send an all-caps tweet threatening war with Iran.

I realize this appears to be the same tactic you used with Kim of North Korea – very tough talk ahead of the summit, to put the United States in a position of strength. However, in neither the North Korea nor Russia exchanges were you doing the PNAC crowd’s bidding. They don’t want hot wars with North Korea or Russia; they want the Cold War with Russia back, so they can funnel tax revenues to their friends.

Not so with Iran. They’ve been trying to pick that fight since at least the Clinton years and they’ll do anything they can to paint you into a corner to force you to back up your bellicose statements. Please don’t hand them the paint can and brush, especially after you just stood toe to toe with them on Russia and told them to pound sand.

Here is a request from a net taxpayer: leave the Persians alone. Neither you nor American taxpayers will benefit from a war with Iran. AIPAC is going to deliver over 70% of the Jewish vote to the Democrats no matter what you do (check the Jewish vote totals in the 2004 and 2008 elections after Bush’s Middle East Wars). Taxpayers will sacrifice blood and treasure for…nothing.

Honestly, we don’t even benefit from sanctions on Iran. Reducing the supply of oil and other Iranian exports just makes the whole world poorer than it would be if Iran could trade freely – I don’ t need to explain supply and demand to a Wharton Business School graduate.

Neither do American taxpayers derive any benefit from Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. I know that’s political heresy, but I’m talking to the man who got elected for heretical speech. Ask yourself: Why should American taxpayers care which is the most powerful country in the Middle East? They shouldn’t. That they have any interest in the question is just a PNAC Jedi mind trick.

We should be the well-wishers to Israel’s freedom and independence, but the defender only of our own. Besides, Iran is never going to attack Israel. If you are truly concerned they might, then negotiate a mutual defense treaty with Israel and send it to the Senate for ratification. I’d rather we stop handing out war guarantees, but this is one that will never be used.

The truth is the anti-Iran drumbeat is just more of the Swamp’s failed foreign policy you campaigned against in 2016. Don’t let them trick you into thinking it’s any different. America First!

Twenty-one years ago, Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowicz, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and a host of other “neoconservatives” collaborated on the “Project for the New American Century.” That produced, among other documents, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” in which Thomas Donnelly posited the US had an opportunity after the fall of the Soviet Union to do whatever it wanted militarily, before a new power rose to challenge it.

Dominating foreign policy and entrenched throughout the military and intelligence establishments ever since, these neocons have attempted to prolong that unchallenged status, including doing all they can to ensure Russia would not again become a superpower rival. To that end, the U.S. government has:

– Broken its promise to Gorbachev that NATO would not move “one inch eastward;” instead rolling the alliance right up to Russia’s borders

– Waged a proxy regime change war against Syria and covertly helped overthrow the elected president of Ukraine, threatening Russia’s only two warm water ports that remain ice-free year round.

– Meddled in Russia’s 2012 elections to attempt to prevent Putin’s re-election, in response to which Russian intelligence retaliated pathetically and ineffectively during the 2016 U.S. presidential election

– Generally done all it can to keep its boot on Russia’s neck and reignite the Cold War, which they’ve somewhat succeeded in doing. This continued throughout the Bush and Obama years – these people don’t care who is president or what you voted for.

They are also likely the primary source of all the propaganda about Trump’s visit to Russia, and the Mueller/Russiagate hoax in general. They will stop at nothing to prevent a normalization of relations with Russia, including fomenting what amounts to mass hysteria among a well-meaning but incredibly naive populace, ready to hate another boogeyman, just like Saddam Hussein (their work as well). Remember “freedom fries?”

Anyone who has read any of my writing knows I am often critical of Trump’s policies, but when you join in on this “treason” nonsense, just be aware of whose side you’re taking. I implore you to look up the document I mentioned for yourselves and check my story.

No, this is not “blaming America” for anything Russia or any other foreign actor does. “America” and the entrenched, unelected bureaucracy in Washington, D.C. are not remotely the same thing, something the American people instinctively grasped during the last election, regardless of whether you believe their candidate was the best solution. And as for anyone who reflexively yells “treason” or even “unpatriotic,” I’d remind them that blind allegiance to one’s government is about as un-American as it gets.

Another Veteran’s Day has come and gone, with the usual high fives all around for anyone who has ever donned a U.S. military uniform. The holiday falling on a Friday this year meant the pro-military sentiments generally lasted throughout the weekend at sporting events and other public gatherings. As always, the ubiquitous mantra from every corner of the republic was, “Thank the troops.”

Sooner or later, somebody has to ask: For what?

The general answer is for the great sacrifices the troops have made to defend freedom. But when was the last time any American’s freedom was in jeopardy from an external threat? Would any American be less free if the U.S. did not invade Afghanistan or Iraq? Vietnam? Deep down, everyone knows Americans aren’t freer because of these wars. So, why do we keep talking like they are?

Let’s take the two wars virtually everyone, across the political spectrum, agree were mistakes: Iraq and Vietnam. It turns out there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and no “domino effect” after Vietnam, even though the mission there was unsuccessful. The communists did take over the country, but Asia and eventually the rest of the world did not fall to communism afterwards. On the contrary, once we stopped fighting them, the Vietnamese had the good sense to abandon communism relatively quickly after we left. Today, they are a major trading partner.

So, neither of these wars benefited the people who paid for them. In fact, American taxpayers and just about everyone else on the planet would have been far better off if neither had been fought at all.

To preempt hysteria in the comments section, no, the men and women in uniform don’t decide which wars they fight and where they are deployed. Fine. But just because the soldiers shouldn’t be blamed for the war, it doesn’t necessarily follow they should be thanked for it, either. If you’re talking to a friend at a cocktail party and a drunken guest bumps him, causing him to spill his drink on your suit, you may not blame your friend for ruining your suit. But would you thank him for it?

Not even President Trump’s harshest critics blame him for creating the North Korean problem. The Kim Jong-Un regime’s nuclear weapons capabilities and willingness to brandish them goes back over a decade, to when Kim’s father was still the ruler.

And while each successive U.S. administration has approached North Korea slightly differently, one thing has remained constant: tens of thousands of U.S. troops on North Korea’s border, maintaining a standoff that just passed its sixty-fourth year.

The other constant, since North Korea’s first nuclear weapons test in 2006, has been economic sanctions imposed on the regime under the auspices of the U.N. Security Council. These sanctions began strictly limited to trade directly related to the regime’s nuclear program and gradually widened to include financial and other trade categories.

One need only read this morning’s headlines to judge their effectiveness.

But over the weekend, President Trump saw every president before him and raised them with this tweet:

There are four days to go before the election and voters are up to their ears in the usual cries of “most important election of our lifetimes” and “we’re at a crossroads,” the latter suggesting, as usual, that the very nature of the republic is at stake.

In reality, there are very few policy differences between the two major party candidates. Both are protectionists. Yes, Trump presents his protectionism with the rhetoric of a classic conservative mercantilist, while Clinton tries to sound more like a socialist unionist. But in the end, they are both willing to champion destructive trade policies to appease specials interests.

Both promise to sign family leave legislation, forcing employers to provide this compensation, which they will either subtract from monetary compensation or add to the prices of their products. Neither Trump nor Clinton have said anything remotely suggesting they will rein in government spying or protect civil liberties in general. And they both promise yet another war of some sort in the Middle East, this time against paper-tiger-boogeyman-of-the-month, ISIS.

But there is one significant policy upon which the candidates appear to disagree, relations with Russia. Trump has stuck by his position to attempt to negotiate with Vladimir Putin, despite the ammunition it has given Clinton in portraying him as being influenced by a foreign power and even a Putin “puppet.”

Clinton has maintained the Establishment position: Putin is aggressive, seeks to expand Russia’s borders and the U.S. must remain firm on curbing this ambition, including military intefvention in the Ukraine.

There is only one problem with the Establishment narrative: It has no basis in reality. A quick glance at maps of NATO in 1991 and 2016, respectively/ makes it abundantly clear that it is not Russia that has expanded over the past 25 years. On the contrary, NATO has expanded eastward, breaking well-documented promises to then-Premier Mikhail Gorbachev it would not do so if he acquiesced to the reunification of Germany. Gorbachev kept his promise; U.S.-led NATO did not.

With NATO now literally on its border, Russia has two things left to lose: it’s only two warm water ports in Tartus, Syria and Sevastopol, Ukraine. And guess where the U.S. has focused its latest “regime change” efforts? The $100 prize goes to the nice lady in the second row who said, “Syria and Ukraine.”

Aggression doesn’t get any more naked than this and, in case you haven’t noticed with all the e-mail servers and groping dominating the news cycles, the Russian’s have zero sense of humor at this point. Yes, there are cover stories on both sides for what is going on in Syria and Ukraine, but the bottom line is this: Russia is not going to give up those ports without a fight. And with a GDP roughly the size of Italy’s, they can’t fight a conventional war against the U.S.

Do the math.

The scariest part is the indifference with which beltway elites seem to be treating the overt preparations for war in Russia. That any intervention by the “exceptional nation” might be resisted with force by a major power seems completely beyond the comprehension of the enlightened ones, as evidenced by the stunned reaction to joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford’s blunt answer to Republican Sen. Roger Whicker on why a no-fly zone over Syria might not be such a swell idea:

Right now, Senator, for us to control all of the airspace in Syria it would require us to go to war, against Syria and Russia. That’s a pretty fundamental decision that certainly I’m not going to make.

Yes, there are many in the national media pooh-poohing “alarmism” over Russia’s recent moves, writing them off as election-year posturing or mere coincidence. Who ever heard of a world war starting due to major powers butting heads over a tiny country, right?

Maps don’t lie. Whatever Washington and Moscow says or does today, they are both involved in conflicts involving assets the Russians are not going to relinquish, in places the United States have no legitimate reason to be in the first place. This doesn’t end well unless the U.S. changes course, something Hillary Clinton has firmly resolved not to do.

She cannot be allowed to ascend to the presidency. If Trump is too flawed, there is still a chance for peace with Libertarian Party Nominee Gary Johnson.

Unsurprisingly, Sunday’s presidential debate opened with a question on Trump’s “locker room talk” scandal. Neither Trump nor his supporters raised any serious objection. It had to be asked and Trump handled it about as well as anyone could expect to handle his indefensible comments. There is even an argument for it being charitable to Trump to open the debate with it, allowing him to address it and get it out of the way, instead of it hanging over the debate like a Sword of Damocles, waiting to torpedo any momentum Trump might have built later in the evening. John King made exactly that argument for why he opened a presidential debate with a Newt Gingrich scandal back in 2012.

And while the “debate” never got far out of the gutter for long, the two candidates did manage to move on and discuss other issues, one of which is getting surprisingly little emphasis from the media or the public at large: the candidates’ positions on Syria and Russia. Here, we have one of the few genuine issues of substance upon which the candidates fundamentally disagree, one far more important than any idiotic statements either of them may have made when they thought no one was listening.

Clinton has stuck by her position that deposing the Bashar Al-Assad regime in Syria is a foreign policy priority for the U.S. She has not backed away from her support for a no fly zone over Syria, despite Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Joseph Dunford’s unqualified statement that it would “require us to go to war” with Russia.

Libertarian Vice-Presidential Nominee Bill Weld has a legitimate beef with the media. On Tuesday, the Boston Globe reported Weld “plans to focus exclusively on blasting Donald Trump over the next five weeks.” Weld denied that claim in an interview with Reason, adding, “No, somebody’s making that up,” in reference to a further claim by the Globe that Weld would henceforth be focusing exclusively on red states.

But libertarian talk show host Kennedy wasn’t entirely satisfied with Weld’s explanations, and with good reason. For while the Boston Globe and other media may have exaggerated or even distorted Weld’s statements, they didn’t just make all of this up out of thin air. Weld himself admits he has been less antagonistic towards the campaign of Hillary Clinton, a personal friend, since accepting the nomination.

Weld says he does not want to see Trump gain the White House because his “proposals in the foreign policy area are so wrongheaded that they’re in a class by themselves.” Bill Kristol and other neoconservatives may agree with him, but virtually no libertarians would. On the contrary, many libertarians ignore Trump’s many odious positions and support him precisely because his foreign policy is so much less hawkish than Clinton’s.

Even Weld’s running mate recognizes this. He’s said on numerous occasions, including during an interview with this writer, that he considers Clinton “a major architect of the conflict going on around the world.” He also said during that interview he agrees with Trump that the next U.S. president should sit down and negotiate with Russia, and went as far as to say he is willing to go “all the way down that road” regarding withdrawing troops from Europe, Japan, and Korea.

Weld has on occasion muddied the water on what “foreign policy proposals” consist of, lumping trade policy in with military intervention, possibly to justify his preference for Clinton. But that dog won’t hunt, either, as Clinton is as protectionist as Trump at the end of the day, with only superficial differences in emphasis and rhetoric. The real difference in foreign policy between Clinton and Trump is on military intervention and Trump’s stance most closely aligns with Johnson/Weld’s. If foreign policy is the chief measuring stick, Clinton is the worse of two bad choices for libertarians, not Trump.

To say Libertarians were skeptical of Weld at the party’s convention in May would be an understatement. Presidential runner-up Austin Petersen endorsed Gary Johnson during his concession speech, but refused to endorse Weld, who failed to gain the nomination on the first ballot. Kennedy’s openly hostile interview of Weld crystalized the accumulated frustration with Weld’s many disappointing statements (from a libertarian perspective) since then. Her charge that Weld was merely using the Libertarian Party for personal advancement may have been unfair. To his credit, Weld handled it well.

What is more concerning for libertarians is that Weld may truly believe his positions are libertarian, rather than merely “centrist” or “moderate Republican.” Contrary to Johnson/Weld rhetoric, libertarianism is not merely “fiscally conservative and socially accepting.” It certainly is not a combination of the “best from both sides” of the Democrat/Republican divide. It is a self-contained political philosophy with its own first principles, most of which depart completely from conservatism and progressive liberalism.

Neither Johnson nor Weld have demonstrated a firm grasp of those principles during the course of their campaign, leading them to positions most libertarians outright oppose. And while there is still a strong case for libertarians to support the ticket, Weld needs to come up with a more believable argument on why he’s #NeverTrump, rather than #NeverHillary. His foreign policy argument for Clinton makes no sense at all.

Another September 11 is upon us and the usual calls for “vigilance,” “resolve” and “remembrance” have begun. For Americans, this has become a quasi-religious event, with the kinds of rituals and communal utterances once reserved for holy days like Christmas and Easter. Except, in this case, it is not a call to love thy neighbor or one’s enemies, but to continue what can only be described objectively as another failed government “war.”

The War on Terrorism is as complete a failure as the War on Drugs. Both share the hallmark symptoms of all such government endeavors: continually increasing budgets, exploding proliferation of what is made war upon, increasingly harsh measures following each successive failure and enormous collateral damage.

At the center of both debacles is the same fundamental issue: the failure to recognize government intervention as the root cause of the problem itself.

The attack fifteen years ago was not the first terrorist attack perpetrated by foreigners on American soil, but it was by far the worst. And just as it does for so many other government-caused catastrophes, the public demanded the government “do something” about it, rather than stop doing the things that motivated the killers.

Or, maybe the public simply went along with the government-media complex’s unison exhortation for a “war on terror,” along with its promotion of the ludicrous ‘hate us for our freedom” explanation of the motivation behind the attacks. Never mind that every single terrorist ever captured and questioned by U.S. authorities – including those prosecuted for the 9/11 attack itself – have cited U.S. military intervention in the Middle East as their motivation.

The unwillingness to accept the perpetrators’ own words for the motivation behind their attacks is unprecedented in American jurisprudence. For any other crime, correctly identifying the motive is a key element of the prosecution’s case. Failure to prove a compelling motive can mean acquittal, even for a guilty defendant. Yet Americans show no interest in the motive for this crime, defaming anyone who talks about it for “blaming America.”

If a wife catches her husband with another woman and shoots him, nobody claims she hated him for his freedom. Acknowledging her true motivation is an integral part of proving her guilty. But for the War on Terror, like most government programs, common sense and logic doesn’t apply.

Regardless of whether one faces reality concerning the motive for 9/11, one thing is certain: terrorism has proliferated enormously since the government declared war upon it, just like drug use. It’s time to ask ourselves exactly what we hope to accomplish with another fifteen years of bombing, invading or sanctioning destitute countries full of people with nothing left to lose.

There are two possible reasons for continuing the “war:” deterrence and revenge. The former is the politically correct reason. The latter is not, but, let’s be honest with ourselves, just as real. When Americans post “never forget,” they are expressing a range of emotions, but among them is the same understandable anger that motivated Sam Houston’s soldiers who exclaimed “Remember the Alamo!” while visiting a merciless slaughter upon Mexican soldiers, even after the Mexicans began trying to surrender.

If revenge is the motivation, it has been accomplished. The 9/11 attackers killed approximately 3,000 Americans. The War on Terror has since killed millions of inhabitants of the Middle East, most of them as innocent as the Americans killed on 9/11. It has ransacked two entire nations, indirectly led to chaos in several others controlled by ISIS and other jihadist groups, and created the refugee crisis we now find ourselves dealing with. For fifteen years, every day has been 9/11 for populations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and several other Middle Eastern countries.

At some point, even Sam Houston’s soldiers stopped the slaughter.

As for deterrence, it should be obvious by now that those of us who always maintained that fighting a conventional war with bombers and ground troops does nothing to deter individual terrorist acts were right. This should be intuitive. How could a conventional army fighting a war thousands of miles away possibly do anything to deter terrorists like the Tsarnaev brothers, who cited those very wars as the motivation for their attacks?

An entire generation of Middle Easterners who weren’t even born on September 11, 2001 will turn fifteen years old tomorrow. They are approaching adulthood having lived their entire lives under the constant threat of death from above, with foreign troops of an alien culture patrolling their streets by day and kicking in their doors at night. Only a fool could expect anything but hatred, rational or not, from people in this situation.

Only a government could suggest this epic failure simply requires more funds spent on the same strategy to turn decades-long failure into success. It’s the same fairy tale taxpayers are told about education, poverty, or drugs. The dynamics don’t miraculously change nor the government become suddenly competent when it is fighting terrorism. But it does create even more lethal problems for those it purports to help.

The big news from last Thursday’s Republican Presidential Debate on Fox News was the absence of what Meghan Kelly called, “the elephant not in the room.” Thanks to the ongoing feud between her and front runner Donald Trump, the latter was not on the stage. In what was largely treated as a footnote, Rand Paul was.

Severalmediahave asserted the debate was more substantive without Trump, the issues having more space in the absence of his overpowering personality and the likely attention that would have been paid to his controversial style. But it wasn’t Trump’s absence that made this debate more substantive. It was Rand Paul’s presence. Without him, the last spectacle wasn’t a debate at all.

Debate moderators are television people. They are interested in whatever makes the best television and gets the highest ratings. The debate moderators on Thursday, echoing the larger media narrative, continually pushed the establishment vs. anti-establishment theme. That’s certainly a phenomenon in this election cycle, but it really means nothing in terms of policy.

The whole purpose of this exercise is to determine the difference, if any, between the candidates seeking the presidency. Without Rand Paul, there isn’t a difference to determine, not even with Trump. Trumps style might be different, but he’s a lot more like an establishment Republican than the media narrative would have one believe.

Robert Eno of Conservative Review named Rand Paul the “standout of the night” after the December 15 Republican Presidential Debate on CNN. Eno laments that the mainstream media, including “conservative media pundits,” will proclaim Rubio the winner. Eno implies these pundits aren’t true conservatives, referring to a species of unicorn sought by millions of self-identified conservative voters.

Rand Paul himself has called out Rubio and other proponents of the U.S. military empire as failing to adhere to authentic conservative principles. The self-named “neoconservatives,” we’re told, are really progressives in Republican clothing, failing to promote the true conservative principles of small government, free markets and a noninterventionist foreign policy.

Rand is right about nonintervention, but he’s wrong about conservatism. There is nothing new about the neoconservatives. The essence of conservativism itself is belief in the need for an all-powerful government that regulates every area of life domestically and dominates every other nation in the world. This has been the conservative worldview for thousands of years. It has never changed.

Conservatives see the world as Thomas Hobbes did. Human nature is so depraved that the government must be powerful enough to “keep them in awe.” Like other enlightenment philosophers, Hobbes saw the relationship of nations to one another as virtually identical to the relationship between individual people. They are all in a de facto state of war unless one nation dominates the rest.

This explains the otherwise puzzling compulsion by generations of U.S. politicians to interfere in the affairs of destitute Third World countries thousands of miles away. Just as individual liberty within society is a threat to the commonwealth, self-determination by any individual nation is a threat to the world order. The “domino theory” offered as justification for the Korean and Viet Nam Wars was firmly rooted in Hobbesian conservatism. So was the British Empire.

Many conservatives would object and point to Edmund Burke or Russell Kirk as representing the true tenets of conservatism. There’s only one problem: Burke and Kirk agree with Hobbes on just about everything.

Hobbes, Burke and Kirk all deny the existence of natural, inalienable rights. Like Hobbes, Burke says that man in the state of nature “has a right to everything,” meaning there can be no rights to life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness. Rather than “to secure these rights,” according to Burke, governments exist so “the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection.”

The only disagreement between Hobbesian “centralizers” and Burkean “constitutionalists” is on how government power should be distributed. The Hobbesians believe the sovereign power can never be safely divided. It must reside in one place, preferably in one man. Hobbesians in American history include Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, and George W. Bush.

The Burkeans believe the opposite. As the politicians have the same dark nature, they must be thwarted, too. Burkean conservatives in American history include John Adams, Robert Taft and Barry Goldwater.

Here’s the rub. While Burkean constitutional conservatives want power divided, they still believe 100% of the power resides somewhere in the government. If the federal government isn’t going to regulate a particular area of life, then the state or municipal government should. Or the town government. Or your local school board. No area of life remains unregulated.

Similarly, the two conservative camps have disagreements on foreign policy, but not on principle. “Old Right” conservatives like Robert Taft may have argued against war, but Taft’s chief argument against participation in NATO was his fear it would concentrate too much power in the executive, although he hints at the non-aggression principle in passing:

“Under the Monroe Doctrine we could change our policy at any time. We could judge whether perhaps one of the countries had given cause for the attack. Only Congress could declare a war in pursuance of the doctrine. Under the new pact the President can take us into war without Congress.”

Contrary to the beliefs of a lot of well-meaning people, individual liberty, limited government and free markets are the antithesis of conservatism and always have been. Mercantilism is the economic system of conservatism; empire its natural foreign policy.

The American Revolution was very much a libertarian revolution against a Hobbesian, mercantilist and militarist empire. The ensuing struggle between Federalists and Jeffersonians was likewise a struggle between conservatism and libertarianism, respectively.

As inconsistent as he sometimes was in practice, Jefferson’s thinking and writing remained consistent on this point throughout his life. He repeatedly cited the libertarian principle that government should “restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free” in describing the limits of government power.

His foreign policy was mostly libertarian as well. Unlike President Obama, he really gutted the military, cutting its budget by over 90% and largely dismantling the navy (the army was already disbanded when he took office). His stated purpose was to make the navy a purely defensive force, incapable of foreign adventures.

Like millions of self-identified conservatives, Rand Paul is trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. He’s trying to see libertarianism as a subset of conservativism, just as Reagan did. It isn’t. It’s no surprise that even his attempt to portray himself as an authentic, Old Right conservative has failed. Trying to blend conservatism and libertarianism leads one into all sorts of self-contradictory positions.

It’s no coincidence that enthusiasm has peaked at those moments when Paul has taken the purely libertarian positions of his father, as he did filibustering drone strikes on American citizens or the Patriot Act. The marketplace of ideas is telling him something.

There is an intuitive libertarian instinct in everyone. The desire to live and let live and use force only in response to aggression is quite literally the “law of nature,” as Locke wrote over three hundred years ago. There are millions of Americans who believe it, but have it philosophically jumbled with the antithetical tenets of conservatism.

Rand Paul may be one of them. Or, he may believe the only way to make America more libertarian is by appealing to conservatives within the political process. Either way, he’s wrong.

Americans are starving for something besides conservatism or liberalism (as it’s defined today). A lot of them just don’t know it. Rand Paul could do the most good by taking his father’s ideas a step farther and rejecting conservatism altogether. It’s a dead end for the liberty movement, just as it always has been.